This was originally posted on https://groupproject.substack.com/
Imagine you’re going to buy a car. 🚗
You go down to the dealership. You want to see how the car feels on the road and if you really like it, so you ask to take it for a test drive.
“Sorry,” the dealer says. “We don’t do test drives. If you want to see what it’s like, you have to buy it.”
You’d get out of there in a hurry.
And yet, anyone rolling out a significant change in their company who doesn’t do an Early Adopter phase is essentially buying a car without a test drive.
To make this a little more relevant: let’s say your company just spent millions of dollars on some new technology that’s going to impact how the entire company gets work done.
You’re the lead for the project so its success or failure ultimately lands on you. You think you’ve solutioned it just the right way and you think you’re ready to drive adoption just the right way for all 25,000 of your company’s employees and you think your support team is ready for anything that comes their way. Would you just go for it without verifying? 😰
So, what does Early Adopters (EA) mean?
Think of it like a dress rehearsal for a live show: you do all the things you’d do when the theater is packed full of audience members, but without the consequences if something goes wrong. And instead of doing it with the entire employee population, you do it with a targeted subset.
Early adopters comes down to learning one thing: are you ready for the big launch?
To determine if you’re ready, you need to define what you need to validate. This usually falls into a few buckets:
💻Technical Readiness
Is the system working as expected? If there’s a technical playbook your team will have to run on the official launch day (licensing people, turning on some process, etc), are they able to do that successfully without hiccups?
* * *
👩🏽💼 Business Readiness
This covers things like training and adoption, communications, and stakeholder engagement. Do the communications clearly explain the change and what users need to do? Does the training successfully teach them to use the new system or are they getting confused? If they get stuck on a business-related issue (versus a technical issue), do they know who to seek out for help (i.e. change champions)?
* * *
☎️ Support Readiness
Someone using your fancy new technology gets stuck. They call IT Support. Do they have a good experience or a bad experience? Is the support agent able to help them? That will depend on whether you’ve properly prepared your Tier 1 and Tier 2 support team members. They need to know the change is coming so they can staff appropriately, potentially train people up on the system, and have access to knowledge articles to help them solve or triage issue.
The length of the early adopters phase depends on what you’re trying to learn. If you need people to go through a full business cycle to get the end-to-end experience and that cycle has dependencies on multiple teams, then you might need a longer phase so that cycle can complete and you have a real-life sample.
If someone can get the full experience quickly, then maybe a short EA phase is fine.
Regardless of length, at the end of EA you want to collect feedback from all the parties involved. How was the experience for the users? What sort of issues did the support team get contacted about? Was there anything the project team would do differently?
Based on that feedback you can adjust your readiness as needed to be better prepared for the official launch.
If something is off, you’re much better off discovering it in EA, because costs to you and the project — political, mental, and financial costs — scale with the number of people impacted.
Running an Early Adopter phase helps you minimize the chance of a shitstorm. If something about the experience sucks, you’re better off finding out with 100 people versus 10,000.
It’s important to remember that EA is not a replacement for formal testing done by the project team. And this is is not a replacement for UAT, either. In theory you’ve already found and fixed any high priority bugs at this point.
Once you’ve got sign-off on those parts of the project, then you’re ready to start an early adopter phase: remember, it’s a dress rehearsal for the big launch and it gives you an opportunity to learn a lot more about your readiness.
